The Warszawa Śródmieście Railway Station is used by thousands of commuters every day, yet many of them don’t even notice the beautiful ceramic mosaics created by the famous Polish artist Wojciech Fangor in the early 1960s.
Fangor was a world-renowned Op-art artist who, in 1970, became the first Polish artist to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His signature style, visible in the station’s mosaics, features smooth color transitions that create a sense of color vibration.
This complex of decorations includes 52 ceiling mosaics above the 3 platforms and 27 wall mosaics in former waiting rooms along the side platforms and in the passageways leading to the central platform. In December 2020, these works were officially registered as movable monuments of the Mazovian Voivodeship due to their artistic and scientific value.
You can spot them blending into the walls of the post-war architecture, a little bit forgotten over the years. The colors of the mosaics were not accidental – according to the scheme, red, orange, and yellow compositions indicate the eastern direction, while blue and green represent the western direction.
The project was the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration among artists from the Academy of Fine Arts. While Fangor developed the overall concept for the mosaics, the decorations were also designed by Stanisław Kucharski, in collaboration with Viola Damięcka and Jolanta Bieguszewska.
The ceramic tiles were manufactured at the Fajans factory in Włocławek, partially using pigments imported from Italy and Lechi Helena Grześkiewicz family were in charge of the technological process and final form of the ceramics.